


a record of the symptoms (is all i have accomplished)

by jessicamiriamdrew



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, modern day AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-12
Updated: 2017-11-12
Packaged: 2019-02-01 04:34:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12697470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessicamiriamdrew/pseuds/jessicamiriamdrew
Summary: the one where lorca gets set up on a mystery date with his ex boyfriend, and, hmm, maybe they aren't quite over each other yet.





	a record of the symptoms (is all i have accomplished)

**Author's Note:**

> a little more angsty than the description ends but it isn't an entirely angsty fic. 
> 
> modern/present au although i've tried to incorporate canon events in a similar way. 
> 
> i tried to write lorca as having extreme photo sensitivity as is canon, but that has become permanent. i also wrote his vision as having difficulties with things with poor contrast.
> 
> the title comes from to be completely honest by dawes, continuing my firm belief that dawes is a v good tylorca inspiration

The problem with befriending your coworkers—however casually—is they inevitably want to set you up. Lorca thought Philippa was different, but apparently they’ve crossed that magical threshold into setting up territory.

“It’ll be fun,” Philippa insists. “When’s the last time you went out with anyone? And no, having sex with Katrina doesn’t count.”

Lorca’s eyebrow raises. “Why doesn’t that count, exactly?” Lorca says. He doesn’t need to date: he’s better alone. History has borne that out over the decades, and he and Kat have fun.

“It’s one dinner,” Philippa says, tone wheedling. She stabs her fork into her salad and Lorca does enjoy her company. Most of the other employees find his need for low light an inconvenience, but Philippa doesn’t say a word. “I’ll pay for your food,” she adds, after Lorca opts to take a bite of his own salad instead of replying.

“And a nice Malbec,” Lorca says. “Hope he likes a dry red.”

“It isn’t good to be alone,” Philippa says, face turning more serious. “You won’t even talk about your last relationship.”

“That relationship ended,” Lorca replies. “What’s left to say?” The salad remaining on his fork is more unpalatable by the second.

“Don’t you want to feel like that again?”

Lorca scoffs, pushing his plate away entirely. “I’ll go on this date, out of respect for our friendship—but that’s the only reason.”

Philippa sighs and takes a sip of her coffee. “You aren’t who you were then. Things can be different, Gabe.”

He wants to believe her sunny, full hearted optimism, but he remembers all too well when Ash left. (“You need therapy. I can’t fix us both.” Lorca had watched him walk away, too numb and angry to stop him, or change when he had the chance.”)

-

Lorca isn’t worried about his appearance, whether the undereye bags on tired white skin are a deterrent. It’s a date and maybe they’ll fuck at the end of the night. He’s not holding out hopes for a second. Most people, despite the time he’s spent trying to overcome his trauma, still run the other way in the morning when confronted with who he is. Lorca is trying to make up for mistakes he can’t undo, and he’ll be damned if he finds the answer sucking a bruise into a stranger’s thigh, but it’s nice, sometimes, to forget. His suit coat and dress slacks are a fall back: Lorca’s only impression needs to be one of attractive impermanence. That’s his most attractive characteristic by far these days.

Philippa’s insistence on walking him to the restaurant is—annoying, to be frank—but the appreciatively cheeky smile she gives him is welcome. “You need someone gentle in your life,” she says as they walk.”

“What, Kat isn’t gentle?” Lorca teases. Philippa and Kat get along well enough for about ten minutes of polite conversation, despite Lorca’s continuing belief they’d be friends if they tried.

“Not like him,” Philippa says, as they round the corner to pause in front of a restaurant. She puts a steadying hand on his elbow, a brief touch. “You don’t have to, but he really is your type.”

Lorca shrugs at her but her quiet concern is appreciated—of all his coworkers, she’s the only one he gives a damn about. He holds the door for her, taking those few seconds to focus on the feeling of his hand on the wood grain. Calming, comforting. He can do a first date. Lorca follows Philippa, her cry of recognition making curiosity burn in his gut.

But the man who shifts in his seat to face him—it’s Ash. The man Lorca used to fantasize about spending the rest of his damn life with, to kiss and hold and maybe even marry. His grandmother’s ring is buried in a drawer still where Lorca doesn’t have to see it.

“This is Ash,” Philippa says, and Lorca can’t come up with a polite response. She nudges him—one of the few people who he allows to touch him like that—and he manages to cough out his first name.

There are more lines on Ash’s face than Lorca remembers—one that Lorca wants to smooth out with his hands, to feel disappear under his touch. Damn poker face is there though, and Lorca can’t tell what Ash is thinking in the low dinner lights. (“Mood lighting,” he’d joked once to Ash. “I always have mood lighting.”) But he looks—better than he did before. Healthier, softer, warmer.

Philippa clears her throat—quite probably misinterpreting this moment as love at first sight, when it’s more like an anxiety attack barreling up through his chest. Lorca turns back to her and smiles. “I think we can handle it from here.” She raises an eyebrow at him but ultimately shrugs—maybe she knows there’s only so much she can push him.

She gives them both a wave good bye, tells them to enjoy their meal, and is out the door. Lorca stands in the same spot, considering how long it’ll take for her to be really gone. If he jolts for the bathroom, stays there for ten minutes…

“Sit, Gabriel,” Ash says, and Lorca has never been able to deny him a damn thing. There’s already a bottle of Malbec at the table: at least Philippa listened to that.

His palms are sweaty as he grabs at the table, grateful that it’s wood under his fingers and not a tablecloth that will slip away.

“I didn’t know,” Lorca says, desperate for Ash to believe him. “Philippa just said that you were tall, and smart, and…” He trails off, embarrassed, because the last descriptor is what he’s missed most of all. “Gentle,” he finishes.

It’s a flicker of a moment but Lorca still catches that outline of a smile, the one that he fell in love with.

“That’s how she described you,” Ash says, hand tapping nervously on the table.

Lorca can’t help it: he snorts, because no one has ever described him as gentle. Anyone who thought that has long been disabused of the thought, with Ash being a prime example. There’s only so many times you can yell before people realize the truth.

He can’t read Ash as well as he’d like, with the continuing degeneration of his eyes and the simple fact that it’s been two years since they’ve been so close. They are different than they were before.

The arrival of the waiter to pour their wine and go over the specials is welcome. Apparently, they’re doing this damn meal, even though Lorca can’t figure out why the hell Ash is bothering.

The menu is too poorly designed for him to be able to read without causing a headache, so he picks the first special that sounds interesting. Ash waits until Lorca has handed over their menus, and the waiter leaves, to ask, like Lorca suspected he would.

“How have you been?” Ash picks up his glass of wine but doesn’t sip it, not yet.

_Be less defensive_ , his therapist says in his head. Lorca ignores the repetitive impulse of his brain to assume that Ash is asking about his eyes. Ash never treated him that way before, and Ash has always cared deeply about everyone. Somehow the thing Lorca loved the most and found troubling.

“I’m the same as always,” Lorca says. It’s tempting to share, but to assume that Ash is feeling the same way as he does is dangerous.

“Philippa wouldn’t have set us up if you were the same,” Ash says. He wonders, then, what Ash says about him. If the story is told of his own failures, or the more canonical events of them being too damaged in disparate ways.

“I work with Philippa,” he says. “I like what we’re doing there. I like helping people, even if it’s just small cases of legal aide” Being a paralegal is not the level of excitement that firefighting was, but he doesn’t expect or want to recapture that.

The moment hangs between them. “I’m getting help,” Lorca adds, the desire to make his differences clear winning out over the more reasonable desire to protect what remains of his heart. The wine glass still dangles between Ash’s slim, brown fingers. “Do you not like reds anymore?”

Ash’s face drops to the glass of wine, as if he’d forgotten he was holding it. A laugh escapes Ash’s mouth and for a moment, Lorca imagines them in a different context. The memory of Ash opening a bottle of wine with his pocket knife because there wasn’t a corkscrew, and both of them just on the wrong side of tipsy for driving. The stripped off button up and the red wine stains on a white undershirt, and how Lorca knew, then, that Ash could have him as long as he cared to.

“I do,” Ash says. “Malbecs are my favorite.”

“Then what?” Lorca asks, grabbing his own glass of wine and nosing the contents of the glass. Spicy and warm with a hint of fruit.

“I guess I was waiting for you to say the bracha.”

Lorca sets the glass down. He doesn’t say many brachot but the blessing for a glass of wine is engrained in him. One of his first memories is blessing the wine and saying the hamotzi on erev Shabbat.

“Be rude of me to keep you waiting, then.” Lorca says the bracha, voice pitched low enough for only the two of them to hear. He reaches his hand toward Ash, muscle memory of how they used to always touch. He doesn’t jerk away, but he retreats. The wine is somehow warm and bitter in his mouth, like something that feels good while it’s happening even though it destroys you after.

Like what he and Ash had done to each other.

Ash sips his wine, too, and when the waiter comes back with dinner rolls, he doesn’t eat until Lorca says the hamotzi.

It’s so easy that it makes him want to call his therapist right then, because he should be feeling tendrils of panic in his chest. Lorca takes a breath and counts back from ten. Ash is still there when he finishes.

-

The bottle of wine empties after their plates are taken away, the waiter offering to get them dessert and another bottle. Ash waves him off, declining politely, while Lorca tries to figure out if that’s a bad sign.

Lorca hands over a credit card for their meal with the waiter, though he’s tempted to send cash and then have a few more guaranteed moments with Ash. He could draw out the process of putting everything away in his wallet.

“Philippa and I work out together,” Ash says. “I used to be her physical therapist.”

It doesn’t feel appropriate for him to have a swell of pride that Ash not only became a physical therapist, but that he has clients who have _graduated_ from him, but it blooms in him regardless.

The knowledge that Ash spends his days helping people, touching them and being touched, when every physical interaction had been a potential reminder of trauma for Ash for so long, is something worth celebrating.

“You’ve done good by yourself, Tyler,” the mock formality earning him a grin.

“Are you in your old place, still?” Lorca asks, floundering for something to add to their conversation while they wait for the return of his card.

“Mm, I got a roommate to defray the cost of my loans,” Ash says. “Her name’s Tilly. We’ve got a two bedroom near the hospital.” Ash’s lips quirk into a real smile, then. “She’s the one who convinced me to go out tonight, and promised to not be home if I gave her twenty minutes notice.”

Lorca laughs from his belly, something that only Kat rarely manages to get out of him these days. He wipes gingerly at his eyes, the laughter so intense that his eyes are tearing up.

“Doesn’t she know you’re not that kind of man?” His laughter dies off, but the mood remains, and Lorca is struck anew by the fondness in Ash’s face.

“I could be,” Ash says, tone shifting like quicksilver.

“Oh,” Lorca says, fumbling with the credit card tray being handed to him. “I wasn’t implying—“

“Maybe I’d like to imply,” Ash says. “You haven’t moved, have you?”

Lorca has not, despite the fact that he saw Ash in every damn corner of the room, until other men and women had come and gone. He shakes his head no, trying his damndest to figure out what this means.

He leans his head down and signs the bill, tipping more than necessary because it’s expedient. He slides the credit card back in his wallet with shaking hands.

They shouldn’t, but Ash is standing up and putting on his black peacoat, and Lorca stumbles to his feet. Ash’s hand reaches out to steady him, and what once would have been unacceptable—taking assistance in its good faith—he now does.

Ash drops his hand once Lorca is firm on his feet, and Lorca shoves his wallet back into his pocket. It’s not a long walk, and half a bottle of wine over dinner has left him feeling comfortable, not drunk, but—

“Let’s get a cab,” Lorca says, because it’s less time for either of them to think this over. Outside the restaurant, the sun has dropped and the air is chilling fast. His suit coat is too thin for the weather, and his knees will ache tomorrow.

The cab ride, which Lorca knows objectively is approximately seven minutes, feels five times that, with Ash’s thigh touching his in the dark.

-

The keys jiggle in his hand as he tries to unlock the door, all too conscious of Ash a half step behind him. When it gives and he pulls back the keys, pushing the door open, giving an automatic half step into the darkness, Ash stumbles into him.

“Oh,” Lorca says. “The cat—“

They get the door closed, dim lights turned on, and Ash cups his face in his hands. “You got a cat,” he says, a level of awe that Lorca, despite how much he loves his cat, doesn’t think the situation deserves.

He doesn’t get a chance to explain because Ash is sliding a hand under his suit coat, warm hands pressing against the side seams of his shirt.

_We should talk_ , Lorca thinks, but he’s a coward, and if this fucked up one night stand is all he can get—well. He’s already in therapy. What’s a few more sessions? They kiss, and Lorca feels something in him crack. He doesn’t know what it portends, so for once, Lorca does what he wants and kisses Ash again.

The peacoat gets dropped to the floor, despite protestations of cat hair, but they’re feeble ones. It’s too new and also familiar, their bodies and minds bearing fresh and stale wounds, some of which they caused each other. Lorca doesn’t know where his suit coat ends up, too far for him to make out properly, but Ash mumbles something about cleaning up in the morning between kisses to the back of his neck. Lorca has always found it hard to believe in the dawning of a new day making a difference, when what he’d gotten before was more of the same, but Ash has always forced him to reconsider.

Ash steers him past the couch, although they pause for an interlude of clothes removal. Lorca tosses Ash’s shirt onto the armchair, his hands lingering over the familiar brown skin. Ash shakes under his careful touches, and Lorca wants him more than anything else.

They make it to the bed, only tripping over the cat once, with Ash shouting an endearing sorry as he closes the bedroom door. Beds are vulnerable places, even when you aren’t naked, and the sight of Ash peeling off his underwear has Lorca fixed in place. They should set parameters for what happens tomorrow, if Ash stays, if it turns into two days.

Instead, Lorca takes off his boxers, so they’re on equal ground, clothing wise, and drops to his knees. Ash doesn’t need encouragement to lean against the side of the bed, and Lorca starts with a kiss to the knee. It’s more than he deserves, to be so close, but Ash’s hands are folding into his hair, and Lorca continues kissing up his thigh.

Lorca pauses, remembering that though they’re here now they aren’t together, and the old rules don’t apply. “I want to blow you,” he says. “Should I get a condom?” Lorca doesn’t care what the answer is—as long as the act itself still happens.

He waits out the beat, fighting the flight response even though they’re in his apartment. Ash looks at him, biting his lip. “I don’t need one,” he says. “Unless you’d prefer it.”

“I don’t,” Lorca says. “Need or want one,” he says. Ash nods at him, and Lorca smiles. He licks across the slit of Ash’s cock, noting how Ash’s hands twist a little more in response. He takes as much time as he can bear, kissing the tip and the sides, all the way down to the base, stopping short of the patch of black hair.

“Gabe,” Ash hisses as Lorca removes one of his hand’s bracketing Ash’s legs to lightly cup his balls. “You never used to be such a tease,” Ash says.

Lorca had thought they had more time, before. He takes Ash into his mouth, humming from the pleasure of it, and the way Ash’s toes curl up against his knee. Lorca tries to match the pace that Ash is setting with the involuntary jerks of his hips and the sighs that keep escaping. One of Ash’s hand disengages from his hair to trace along the edge of Lorca’s lips, stretched as they are around Ash’s dick.

Ash doesn’t warn him when he comes, but Lorca doesn’t need him to. He’s spent enough time in this position, with Ash’s muscles tensing and breath arching, a bodily symphony Lorca never fully appreciated. He pulls back only when Ash starts to do the same, tamping down the urge to make a smug comment. In a different time, he would have, but Ash is too precious now.

He shifts to his feet, using Ash’s thigh to steady himself, like this is still their normal state. Like touching Ash is so commonplace that Lorca can treat him as a constant. Ash’s hand reaches out to Lorca’s mouth, fingers delineating the lines of Lorca’s mouth. It’s easy to lean into his hand, to feel Ash shudder as Lorca gently kisses the pads of his fingers. “Did you want me to fuck you?” he asks, moving Ash’s hand away, curling their fingers together, taking a step into his space.

“Please,” Ash says, pressing his leg what has to be deliberately against Lorca’s cock. Their mouths meet and the gasp of surprise drawn from Lorca’s throat when Ash bites his lip is real. Who moves on to the bed first is immaterial when Ash’s limbs are sliding over his.

They kiss slowly as their bodies adjust, a combination of learned preferences and the newness of their bodies, having been strangers for a few years. But there’s that eagerness so present in Ash’s personality that is echoed in his movements. Lorca wants to take his time with this, to spend hours relearning the scars that he recognizes and hearing the stories of any he doesn’t, but he’s worried the spell will break. That the urgency might be what’s keeping Ash in his bed, so he subsumes his desire to lay Ash out and cherish him.

Ash watches him as Lorca leans to the side of the bed to grab lube, and he’s ever cautious about Ash’s history. Some things don’t fade, no matter how much therapy and trust are poured in to fixing a thing. Lorca starts slowly, warming the lube the best he can with his hands. His hands were steadier, once, but now, with everything pouring out of him into this instant he’s grasping, he’s less than graceful. Ash on his back, one hand resting near his again hard cock, while the other reaches out softly to touch Lorca’s face. The noises that tumble from Ash’s throat as Lorca works a finger into him are all encompassing in Lorca’s mind. When a third finger alters the muted moans to something more urgent, it’s Ash who stops him.

“I’d like to be on top of you,” he says, and Lorca recognizes the trepidation that has yet to vanish. Lorca is all too willing to put himself flat on his back, to let Ash climb on top of him. The permissiveness of Ash to allow Lorca to touch him, to be vulnerable to him, still astounds him.

Lorca holds his hands back as Ash sinks down onto his cock, letting Ash have the power, and waiting until the tight posture of Ash’s back relaxes. He’s not so young that he’s close to losing it already, but he’d forgotten the headiness of someone you love trusting you with themselves.

Ash bends over to kiss him and Lorca gasps out a breath he didn’t know he was holding, their mouths together, and their bodies connected. He reaches a hand out to the mess of Ash’s hair that’s coming undone, whatever hair product Ash has used giving in to gravity and the ferocity with which Lorca is now clinging to him. “Ash,” he says, because there’s nothing else to say when Ash is fucking himself, the rhythm so controlled that even the shaking of Lorca’s hips can’t break it.

“Touch me,” Ash says, and Lorca is transfixed, but he removes his hand from Ash’s hair and drops it to a hipbone, fingers settling into the corner there. The first stroke of his hand on Ash’s cock is clumsy and imperfect but Ash moans anyway. Lorca trembles as Ash adjusts, allowing Lorca leverage to thrust into Ash. Their breath ghosts across each other’s lips and Lorca takes Ash in hand firmly, determined that Ash should come again before Lorca does.

The damn lip biting, that Lorca fantasized about before, during, and after they were together is happening again and Lorca knows that symbol. Ash is trying to hold back, to deny himself, even though Ash’s fingers are twisting hard in the sheets. He lifts his head up enough to kiss Ash, coaxing him forward. “I’ve got you,” he says, twisting his hand just so, and Ash trusts him and lets go.

The weight of Ash’s body shifts as he comes and Lorca waits it out. Ash smiles at him as the urgency fades, and the movement of Ash’s body is deliberate. But it’s the unhurried kiss that Ash presses to his lips that has Lorca’s back arching. Ash kisses him through the aftershocks, tender and knowing, until the physical discomfort is too much.

They disengage and the fear creeps into the post orgasm haze of Lorca’s body. The staccato beating of his heart does nothing to assuage his fear of being left.

“I’ll get a towel,” Ash says, and the domesticity of it only hits him Ash returns to the bed a few moments later with a warm and damp towel. Ash assumed, didn’t ask, that the towels are where they’ve always been. Lorca’s difficulty with change is something his therapist likes to harp on, but in this moment that stubbornness is serving him well.

He takes the towel he’s offered, taking a moment to wipe at Ash’s skin although it’s clear he already did most of the cleaning. His own body he treats less carefully, wiping roughly until he can justify tossing the towel to the side.

_We should talk_ , he thinks again, but Ash is settling in next to him, grabbing the folded quilt at the foot of the bed to wrap it around the both of them. Lorca lets himself be molded into the small spoon, the comforting presence of Ash’s hand across his stomach a luxury he never thought he’d again experience. The quilt is warm, and Ash is dropping a few lazy kisses to the back of his neck.

There’s nothing at all miraculous about the fact that Lorca falls asleep with Ash cradling him. The real wonder is that Ash is beside him, bleary eyed and sleepy, when Lorca awakens.

They kiss their way back to higher cognitive function, but with that comes the surety that they can’t ignore the flurry of the last few hours.

“You got a cat,” Ash says, repeating his earlier remark, arm wrapped around Lorca’s side. “Never took you for a cat person.”

Lorca closes his eyes: the darkness of his eyelids is where he feels safest these days. “I needed someone to take care of.”

Ash twists away from him, and Lorca opens his eyes to see Ash propping his head up on one elbow. “Are you taking care of yourself?”

Lorca sighs, because some days that tired question is the only thing he hears from others. Self-concern is so new and fresh, still, and Ash inquiring after him is something he never thought he’d have again.

“I’m not the only one with PTSD,” he replies, tracing a hand over the scars on Ash’s hip. There’s a reason Lorca has been careful to be below Ash all evening, to make it clear that he has no intent of taking control.

“I didn’t leave because of yours,” Ash says, eyes avoiding Lorca’s own. “We weren’t healing, being together.” Days where Ash couldn’t bear for Lorca to touch him, the nights where Lorca had enough drinks to blur the details of the Buran building explosion, and the evenings where they circled each other, nervous and wary.

“I know,” Lorca sighs out. It’s the truth he’s been pushing aside: that, things being what they were, maybe they simply weren’t meant to be happy together. “I go to synagogue, sometimes,” Lorca adds, picking up the earlier thread. “Don’t believe in God, but it helps.” It’s strange that he fears Ash’s response to this, that his body is open but his Jewishness needs protecting.

“I started keeping halal,” Ash says. “It reminds me that my body is mine.” Five years ago, that would have been trite in Lorca’s mind. Now it’s something he understands, the comfort of control and tradition.

They’re sizing each other up, laying out their scars, and showing off. _I did this without you_ and _I did this for you_ blur together as a mantra in his head.

On the darkest days, he never expected to see Ash again, cursed to glimpse the back of a head of black hair in a public place and wonder. In the best of his dreams, Ash never left because Lorca got help from the beginning, and Ash accepted his touch as the healing Lorca had always desired to impart.

In this, the muddiness of reality, neither of them are for each other. But Lorca looks at the dark skin of Ash’s wrist, remembers the flurry of kisses he’d pressed into his skin on a whim, and imagines they could be together that way again.

“Do you remember,” Ash says, pressing himself against Lorca’s body, their foreheads brushing, “when I said I’d been waiting for the right man?”

Lorca presses a kiss to Ash’s lips in lieu of a real answer. Of course he remembers the moment when they met: it’s been the backdrop of his failure to keep them together.

“You aren’t him,” Ash says, and blood pounds in Lorca’s head. Maybe Ash knows how those words sounds, because this time Ash drops a kiss to Lorca’s mouth. “But I don’t want you to be, either.”

They expected too much from themselves and each other, Lorca knows that now. But he no longer feels the agony of each moment as some kind of magical thought that he caused. The kiss Lorca initiates is as a covenant: to be what they are together, not what they should have been.  

**Author's Note:**

> uhh i worked on this for a while, let it sit, did a flurry of additional writing, and now i'm dumping it out here. sorry if it was really bad!
> 
> karlurbansvevo/phalangine read this at various points and convinced me not to delete it, so ty for the encouragement.


End file.
